Case Study

Amber Kinetics partners with Lingo Live to develop management and organization skills

Amber Kinetics partnered with Lingo Live to help with leadership and career development. At the time, most company employees were highly technical with little management training. As the company grew, it wanted its employees to progress from within and ensure they were put in a position for success.

Amber Kinetics Case Study

The company

Amber Kinetics, founded in 2008, is the industry-leader in manufacturing grid-scale kinetic energy storage systems (KESS). As the only provider of long-duration flywheel energy storage, Amber Kinetics extends the duration and efficiency of flywheels from minutes to hours—resulting in safe, economical and reliable energy storage. The company is headquartered in Manila, Philippines near two production facilities, with a research & development facility in the United States, as well as a sales team in Australia. The teams in the US and the Phillippines work closely together to build prototypes and then final products in order to provide an emission-free, economical and safe energy storage solution—creating reliable energy infrastructure around the world.

The Company

“Lingo Live meets people where they are and provides the individual support they need along their management path.”

Will Colban
GM
Amber Kinetics

The challenge and solution

Employees had varied backgrounds of exposure and experience of being technically savvy, but most had little management experience. Lingo Live met people where they were and provided the support they needed along their path.

Lingo Live was initiated with a cohort of 10 to develop leadership skills. Coaches were excellent at helping to manage fire drills and giving support with difficult business decisions.

The Challenge and Solution

Common results from working with Lingo Live

  • People who want to lead teams and projects get an opportunity to build on their non-technical skill sets which is just as important, offering more opportunities for people to move into leadership roles.
  • Project managers are able to be more organized and assertive assuring timelines are adhered to, risks mitigated, and time is valuably spent so that a lot more can get done with the same amount of people.
  • Team leaders become more empathetic and better at managing the people that report to them, and at having real and difficult conversations.
Common Results

Real examples

Will was originally a coachee with Lingo Live and now as General Manager of Amber Kinetics is a key stakeholder and helps choose employees who will participate. With the guidance and support of his coach, he learned how to let go of an employee in an ethical and compassionate way that fell back on company values. He also was coached on how to best reorg a team that lost its manager and decide who should take the place. Decided in a coaching session, he discovered the best way forward was to split the team and have two new leaders.

Real Examples

Another employee worked with a coach to implement a task management system for building and testing prototypes. Prior to this, it was multiple tasks (assembling, testing and transporting units) from various teams (machine shop, testing shop and services shop) happening in real-time with little coordination or management oversite to create a smooth process.

This created longer times to market and revenue. By working with a coach, this employee was able to identify all the different types of work needed, categorize them and develop a request system led by a committee that manages tasks so they are performed in smooth coordination. This new process was so successful that it was mirrored at the Phillippines headquarters.

Real Example

Amber Kinetics is now engaged with its second cohort in partnership with Lingo Live. Outside of coaching, the team finds they have a great relationship with the account reps who provide regular reports and metrics that demonstrate business observations and impacts.

“It’s a more personalized way to develop leadership and interpersonal skills instead of a management school. And we get regular reports and metrics that demonstrate business observations and impacts.”

Will Colban
GM
Amber Kinetics

Unlock the full potential of your talent